Stefan Aust, Editor in Chief, Der Spiegel, Q & A

August 20, 1998 


Stefan Aust: When I got to school, I started working for a magazine, a 
monthly magazine, which was kind of a radical magazine called Concrete, 
where maybe you know, the famous German terrorists ... (inaudible) .... 
from the Red Army Faction was the communists at that time so I didn't go 
there for political reasons, just to work at a magazine, so I worked 
there for about three years and after that I started working for 
television, as a television journalist (in the arts?...inaudible) I was 
working mainly for a kind of political magazine weekly, which is a 
little bit like CBS 60 minutes something like that, and then in the 
middle of the 80s, I had quit my job--I quit half of the job, I worked 
six months a year, and I got half of the salary and I started writing a 
few books, which turned out to be pretty big successes. One was 
(inaudible title and was on German bestseller list for three years? 
laughter), After that in Germany they changed the regulations for 
television. We only had public television up to 1988, they changed it 
and started commercial television in Germany and there were two big 
commercial stations. One was RTL and one was ????. Actually RTL is the 
biggest in Germany now and Der Speigel magazine started as a weekly 
magazine there, which was about the same magazine type I worked for, 
which people called (inaudible...panoramic at the ???). So we started, 
actually I started with a few people this weekly magazine on Sunday 
nights, which is still on the air, we just had 500th edition last week, 
so that's about for ten years and (inaudible....) started in May 88 and 
I ran it for about 6 1/2 years I'm still in charge of that. We started 
with one program, one magazine type program on Sunday night at 10 on 
RTL, then we had second run which is a documentary on Sunday nights now 
on ??? the second biggest, and for another smaller channel called ??? 
which is being owned by Murdoch, or half being owned by Murdoch, which 
is a little bit like Fox TV in America, we're running about 8 different 
programs on that channel including the news. So it's quite a big 
production company now. About 3 1/2 years ago they took me over to Der 
Speigel. I don't know why. They must have been in big trouble (Stefan 
laughs)...actually had?. Because of the whole situation with the German 
printing business changed after they produced commercial television, up 
to about ten years ago the average German viewer watched about 2 hours 
of television a day and since they introduced commercial television, 
they watch 3 hours a day so you can imagine that they have to take the 
time from some thing so that means, that's actually my theory, that they 
stopped reading. So at that time, they introduced there was a new 
magazine introduced in Germany, five years ago called ????, which is you 
could say, like it's a lighter version of Der Speigel. Up to that time 
Der Speigel printed many pictures in black, just a little color in it, 
the paper was not very good, and Focus??? (mag. title) introduced a new 
style of journalism into the market, which was mainly very short 
articles very short stories, the whole design looked like a computer 
screen that was the idea. So they had a lot of ??? and pictures and ??? 
and During that time suddenly Der Speigel looked quite old and so the 
circulation dropped, not very much, but a little, we can go into that a 
little bit later maybe, and Der Speigel became a little bit old 
fashioned. So their advertising rate?? dropped, so they decided first to 
put one editor in charge of Der Speigel, because they always had two 
editors. They had one publisher who is the owner, well part and the main 
owner and founder, a man, NAME????, a very famous person in Germany, and 
he was the publisher and he had always two editors in chief who changed 
from week to week to run the magazine. 

David Abrahamson: Readers Digest used to have that system too. 

Stefan Aust: And because he's rather old, he turned 75 this year, they 
decided first to change the system to have one editor in chief so they 
sent one of the editors in chief to another magazine, called Manager?? 
magazine and is published by Der Speigel as well. And so they had one 
editor, and he had two deputies. And after about three months, they 
threw him out. (Stefan laughs). They fired him. He's the editor of ??? 
now so he got a lot of money and he still has a job so ????inaudible. 
And then they took me from television and put me in charge of Der 
Speigel as the editor and so I'm still there. 

DA: Interesting, interesting, thank you very much, are there any 
questions?

Student: When you took over as editor what kind of direction did you 
want to take the magazine in, what were the changes that you wanted to 
make and have you been successful?

Stephen Aust: Well actually, as I said Der Speigel looked a little bit 
old fashioned, if you compared it to Focus??title, but my idea was not 
to change the content, but to change the outfit a little, but not too 
much. So what we did, it took me quite some time actually, to push the 
publishing company so that they put some money...inaudible....about four 
years ago...So we decided to ??? to paper and print it in color. The 
whole thing. And we changed the layout so the magazine looked quite 
different. And I did it step by step because I always thought that the 
reader who's been used to a certain type of magazine would be shocked if 
we would do it from one day to the other. So the first thing I did to 
have more pages that were printed in color, so adding kind of every 
month a little bit more so that in the end it was printed in color all 
over and nobody actually realized this. Then as a next step we changed 
the layout, well this is my period of time so it doesn't look much 
different (showing a copy?) This is after we changed it, So we did it 
step by step. As far as you talk about the content, I didn't change very 
much, what we did, the pages with short were kind of news stories, we 
concentrated them in the front so we have more pages in the front with 
short, very short, (showing magazine) It was actually was really funny 
because we had this ??Deutschland panorama?? what you call we had two 
pages in the front and two pages somewhere inside, and actually before I 
took this job I didn't know why they had two of the that. And the reason 
was there were only two departments in the magazine. One was called 
Deutschland 1 and the other was called Deutschland 2. And everybody 
wanted to have their own pages with short things and it didn't make 
sense at all. It was actually the same so we concentrated it in front 
and on the other hand we continued to print long, investigative stories 
and in one of the first interviews I gave at the beginning I said back 
to the roots--going back into reporting investigative reporting things 
like that and so after about two years I was sick and tired as hell of 
hearing of everyone wanting to go back to the roots and actually I 
always said back to the roots and I changed the whole thing. 

DA: In America, the print culture in journalism is somewhat different 
from the culture in television news, and one of those differences is 
that the print culture considers itself, significantly superior to the 
television culture. This is a matter of belief not a fact. As someone 
with a background in television news did you find when you were 
appointed to take over an institution a print institution like Der 
Speigel that was something, is there an equivalent in German journalism 
that you had to be aware of at the time? somehow ameliorate?

Stefan Aust: Actually I have a very strange view of that. I think it is 
completely the other way around. I don't talk about TV news I just talk 
about the type of program I was responsible for and from my experience, 
the TV journalists I know and especially the part I work for, they are 
far more reliable than print journalists and I'll tell you why. If 
you're a print journalist and you write an article, it very often 
happens that you quote some unknown source, it happens all the time, 
everywhere, so somebody who actually ought to know it said, quote, and 
you can't do it in TV journalism. Either you have somebody in front of 
the camera or not or I kind of invented the ?? ??, we made a lot of 
stories based on documents, when I was working for television, so we 
made a lot of stories about the East German people and ???everything 
that had to do with them after the fall of the Wall and reunification, 
it was rather easy to get hold of documents of the east Germans so we 
had a lot of stories about Secret Service affairs and agents that are 
still in politics. So we always had documents and I always had a red 
marker and made my red sign around the words that were ????. If I wanted 
to show a story on TV I needed the documents to show it because I needed 
the footage and I never quote unknown sources, because I needed the 
interviews and to show something, and this kind of approach brings you 
into a situation where you have to prove everything, and my experience 
from Der Speigel is that a lot of times the journalists say, well I 
heard that from a really good source, and then they print it, and 
afterwards you get in trouble because you cannot prove it. So I always 
said it's not enough that you know it, you have to prove it. So from my 
experience it's actually the other way around. It's funny, for instance, 
when Time magazine printed that story that they did together with Peter 
Arnett and CNN about the American deserters who had been poisoned by 
poisonous gas in Vietnam, it was a very interesting story. And I said we 
should do the same story and print it and what they did, we had the 
story because we have a contract with Time magazine where we can use all 
the material and we bought pictures, we made the story we said Time 
said, CNN said, so after it turned up that story was not true, it was 
not really our problem. 

DA: But you did not re-report the story...

Stefan Aust: No we said this is a story by Time and Time was quoted, 
and actually if I look at it now it would have been better well no to do 
it at all first, but technically to hold it arms length?? which they 
didn't do enough, but we have correspondents for Der Speigel television 
in Washington, and they started to work on the same story, and they 
didn't do it. Because they said...I learned that later...because as a 
correspondent I ????? seven or eight years ago and she lived in America 
for a long time and we did a lot of Vietnam stories together. And I told 
her to do a story about it that it would be a big story and she did some 
research and she said I don't believe that story I'm not going to do it. 
So sometimes it's the other way around. 

Student question (inaudible).

Stefan Aust: Actually in 1988, nobody believed that Der Speigel could 
have a circulation of more than a million. The circulation was a little 
bit under a million-900,000. And then we had all these interesting and 
surprising and unbelievable here and the change in East Germany, and 
everything that was happening, communism collapsing, the Wall coming 
down, and then finally reunification. And during that period of time Der 
Speigel's circulation grows to about 1.1, 1,150,000 an average, that was 
rather high but if you compare it to all the changes it was not that 
much more. It was something like 200,000 more. And it was the only 
weekly political magazine on the market and at the time it was very high 
and it made a ??fortune?? during that time. That was the time when the 
first Gulf War was, which was really amazing I could tell you an 
example, the death of ??? the former German chancellor??, the copy with 
his face on the cover was the best selling Speigel of all the years, 
1.25 million, during the Gulf War the circulation was very high at that 
time. After 1992, the circulation fell. And it fell to about 1,050,000 
or around that when I took over and it was dropping all the time after 
that, and we managed now to stabilize at that level, that means we sell 
about between 1,040,000 sometimes, 1.1 we always had 2 or 3 issues near 
that or beyond so that's about....

DA: How much newsstand, how much subscription?

Stefan Aust: ...to compare to an American magazine, Time magazine sells 
about 9o percent subscription, Der Speigel sells about 500,000 on the 
newsstand so a little bit less than half of it and we have about 300,000 
subscribers and the rest is airline, foreign countries and other 
different things. So it's rather high. (inaudible) since I took over we 
managed to stabilize it and that's about it. But if you compare it to 
let's say another German weekly magazine, TITLE, TITLE magazine, which 
is still the biggest, a little bit higher than Der Speigel, they sold, 
about ten years ago, they sold 950,000 on the newsstand, and it dropped 
to 500,000 copies and (inaudible). And all the other magazines I think 
Time has dropped by 60 or 70 percent, it's really unbelievable, and 
Speigel has about the same circulation it had ten years ago. The little 
boom around the beginning 90s, so we're back to what we had in 88.

DA: What is the franchise of a weekly news digest kind of magazine 
today? We have the editor of the Economist coming tomorrow. Clearly they 
have defined a position for themselves, much smaller, but with much more 
emphasis on the analysis with the presumption that you've already 
received all of the news already by television and they see as their 
franchise telling you what it means. Der Speigel and Time, the more 
conventional news magazines, are still, one could argue they are still 
searching for what is the correct they cannot do what they did twenty 
years ago. What in your view is the future of the weekly?

Stefan Aust: In a certain way it is the same approach, in a certain 
part??, when you look at say the political reporting that we do. We 
always realize that TV news is much faster than we are even if we have 
real news in it, it's been on the market before the magazine is out. So 
that's why on Saturday, we give the most important news we have in the 
magazine to the agency, so we give it to the others and most of the time 
they quote us, so most of the time on Mondays German magazines are full 
of stories that they take from Der Speigel. So most of the time it's not 
even important for us to have the news first. Because we give it out 
first anyway because the magazine is printed on Saturday afternoon, and 
all the agencies have it, so it doesn't really help us except that 
Speigel is quoted on Monday or during the week on TV or in radio. The 
most important thing is that we go into the depths of political affairs, 
that we really go back into it. In a certain way it is the same as what 
the Economist does, but we only do it in certain parts of the magazine. 
So I would say that the whole wideness of themes and subjects in is much 
wider than in any other newspaper or magazine in the world. Sometimes 
when we make fun about ourselves we say its some kind of mixture Time, 
Economist, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and maybe People magazine 
(laughs) you know it's very broad.

DA: With that sort of circulation on the newsstand, 500,000 more than 
your subscriptions, the cover must be terribly important to you. Do you 
find your profitability rises and falls, with your success on selecting 
a cover that will sell. Could you share with us your philosophy about 
what you want on the cover, what sells and what doesn't sell...

Stefan Aust: (inaudible) One. And that sold very well. and I think that 
it was a very good cover. I was kind of proud of it actually because it 
had a very good line, called we had a black and white photo and we said, 
it was in German, ?????(in German) "Death of a princess in the times of 
mass media." It was a very long kind of sophisticated line and actually 
that sold very well. We sold more than 1.15 million. It was really 
amazing. The best selling cover of this year was the about the 
inquisition ??of the church. When the Pope opened the archives, we had a 
big cover story about this, we had an old picture old painting on the 
cover, and it was a best seller. And actually the second best selling 
was (inaudible). The worst selling covers was Viagra. Everybody thought 
you could sell with this, not at all, it was probably the story for old 
editors. (laughter). The cover story is very important, its very 
important and sometimes when we have current affairs on the cover and we 
think on Friday or Thursday when we decide about it that this is the top 
story and during the weekend everyone forgets about it and on Monday 
your quite old with it, that happens quite often, but not always. I was 
in America somewhere and we had a cover story that was ready and 
everything was fine and then on Wednesday morning we had this big train 
crash in Germany....???ICE.... terrible disaster and so we discussed on 
the phone whether we should make a cover story of it. But on the other 
hand, Monday it's forgotten, it was a very big thing news was all over 
with the accident. I went home and we changed the cover story and I 
arrived home Friday at noon, I changed the current cover story and that 
one sold very well, which I didn't expect, I thought it would be over. 
This was one of the cases when the readers of Der Speigel expect that we 
have something special and on the other hand the change of the 
circulation is very low--that means it is very stable. It changes on 
average we have between 1,030,000 and 1,060,000. That's actually very 
stable. very stable. Again, we can make mistakes. We can even when a 
cover story when our publisher wants to write a cover story, he can 
always do it. He can write whatever he wants you know Laugh(, and he has 
his specialties. So he wrote a cover story about Bismarck and ???, you 
would never expect that this could sell on the newsstand. We sold 
1,012,000. I mean this is very good for Bismarck and Fontana??. I mean 
who knows Fontana???I mean not many people know Bismarck, Nobody in this 
room. Does anybody know who Bismarck was? No, well he was the German 
???? chancellor in the 19th century who actually formed the German 
army?????inaudible, different kings and counts and whatever and he put 
it together into one package so he was one of the most important 
politicians we ever had he died a couple of years ago. At the same time 
there was a poet, writer called Fontana???, who wrote a lot about 
the???inaudible, they called him ???? and there was some kind of special 
relationship, I wouldn't have expected a lot of people to buy that, but 
they did. 

Student Question: Something about conflict of interest with the 
publisher writing stories. 

Stefan Aust: Actually, he is the publisher and he owns 25 percent I 
always say, if he doesn't want to write every fourth story, it's all 
right with me. He doesn't do it very often, he writes very well, and he 
has his readers. Last year he wrote a cover story about Hitler and 
Vogna???, and that sold very well. He's very much into history and Der 
Speigel does very good when we publish stories about history. I think 
it's better when we or the publisher himself decides I think this is 
interesting except that always listening what you think what the reader 
wants to read. Actually I made the biggest mistake when I was thinking 
what would sell the most copies and you're always wrong. When I sit 
there during the week and especially on Friday and I have to decide 
about a cover story or a cover picture most of the time I'm kind of 
sitting there planning?? or painting?? it myself and more or less 
telling them what to do, if I think we should pick this or this subject 
in order to sell a lot copies we're always wrong. Most of the time the 
best is when I think myself what would I be interested in to read myself 
and because I always say I am over average, most of the time that works 
quite well. 

DA: But I think the unstated dimension of the question was at least 
among American magazines, the publishers oversee the business side and 
the advertising sales also and is there ever a conflict of interest 
there?

Stefan Aust: The publisher was the wrong word. His position is he 
founded the whole thing and he's a journalist, he's not a business man. 
Not at all, actually. He founded it and he's more like actually the 
editor or the editorial director (back and forth with Stefan and David 
over this)he's not on the business side. That's certainly special about 
Der Speigel it being the most important part is not the publisher's 
part, it's not the business part, it's the editorial part. So that one, 
chairman of the board, so the chairman, he is...well I'm not reporting 
to him, he is only responsible for my salary, which is a lot, not the 
salary(laughs), but the responsibility. I am reporting to ??? who is the 
editorial director. But we would never do anything the publishing side 
or the business side is the most important thing. Actually you are 
always in a certain kind of situation where you'll have to think about 
it. Most of the companies, for instance if you look at the business 
section, you write about are companies at the same time that have 
advertisements in the magazine. And everybody would lie if he said he 
doesn't think about it. You always think about it, but most of the time 
you think about it in a way that you say we look twice about whether it 
is true or not, but we don't take...

DA: You don't censor yourself.

Stefan Aust: No, not at all. Actually in this period of time since I'm 
responsible, we made a lot of stories about the German banks, and what 
they did to withdraw taxes and so we had quite some trouble with 
??name?? Bank, they took away, I think, they were in the magazine with 
an advertisement for the first time, twenty pages, which is a lot of 
money, and they took all out and we had another story about ??name?? 
Bank and they had advertising in the magazine for the last 20 or 30 
years and they took it all away. And for a certain time before I was 
there, they made a cover story about ???, and they reduced the 
advertisement, the first story, they had about 72 pages before that, 
after the first cover story, they cut it in half so we had 36 left. And 
the second story, they cut it in half again so we had 16 pages. 

Student: How can you afford to do that, are there that many other 
advertisers.....

Stefan Aust: Not really, not really, we have to live with it and the 
most important thing is that you're independent and that you never 
censor a story because you are afraid that somebody will put away the 
advertisement, on the other hand you look at it, and say there shouldn't 
be mistakes in the story. They come back. After a certain time, they 
come back. So for example, (??name?? maybe Volkswagen,) after about five 
years, they came back and ??? Bank came back after one or two years. 
Because it's still the most important weekly magazine in Germany, we 
reach a lot of a lot of people they cannot reach with another magazine. 
And on the other hand it's interesting if you compare it with Focus 
magazine, you know the new magazine I talked about, they have a lot of 
advertisements, more advertisements than Speigel has, more pages, not in 
money because they have a lower circulation, so the advertisements are 
much cheaper than ours--about 20 percent if you compare it. The 
difference, and this is really interesting, the difference in the number 
of pages, they have more than we have during the year is from those 
companies that for political reasons don't have advertisements in Der 
Speigel. Very conservative, southern German organizations.

DA: Is Speigel regarded as liberal?

Stefan Aust: Yes, which if you compare it to some of the positions in 
German if you put it all together it is mainstream liberal-that's about 
it. It's not a wild radical position. But there are some companies like 
the ???Bosht??? the big electronics company, they don't have any 
advertisements in Der Speigel since 70, because we had a big story in 
70, I say we, but I was not at the magazine at that time, about illegal 
financing of political parties and the Bosht?? company played a 
significant role in that and since that the head of Bosht?? decided to 
not put any advertisement in Speigel anymore, it cost us a lot of money. 

DA: I know the CPM, cost per thousand, for most, for Time and Newsweek, 
outside the special demographic edition is somewhere between $15-$20 on 
the black and white. Your CPM is about $30, which means that your 
advertisers must believe that you're reaching a significantly more 
select audience. But a million readers in Germany is the equivalent of 5 
million readers in the United States. 

Student question: inaudible

Stefan Aust: If we compare our circulation and advertisements and 
things we compare it with two different magazines. One is Focus?? which 
they call themselves a news magazine which actually it's not really a 
news magazine, it's an illustrated?? magazine you would say. They don't 
go very deep into the stories and from a journalistic point of view it's 
not very good. It's very well made, it looks very good, actually its 
layout is oriented after a window, they actually say that, the idea that 
is, you would say is the print answer to zapping (with remote?) on TV. 
Very short, you can go into everything and you can go out at the same 
time and you can go through it. It takes you about an hour or one and a 
half hours because it has a lot of pages, and afterwards you don't 
really know if you read it or not, and actually it doesn't make a 
difference. And actually, they have lots of problems right now with the 
circulation. They have to do a lot of ????(sounded like dirty tricks) to 
push up their circulation. They dropped on the newsstand. They dropped 
from this year to the last year, actually the whole market is dropping a 
little, so we all sell a little bit less on the newsstand. Everybody 
does and we try to compensate it which is very expensive, by bringing up 
the subscribers and actually in Germany if you subscribe to a magazine, 
you don't save money, it costs you the same so its not cheaper while 
Time and Newsweek, it's very cheap. I think it's something like $16.

DA: It's roughly discounted to about roughly a third of the newsstand 
price. 

Stefan Aust: If you subscribe to Der Speigel, it's actually the same. 

DA: If you reduce the price, would you sell more subscriptions?

Stefan Aust: I don't know. I don't think so. At the same time, maybe, 
but at the same time you would have a problem on the newsstand, and we 
live on the money we make on the newsstand as well. Focus doesn't make 
money on the newsstand. We have a ???? (word for draw) of about 25%. We 
get back 25%. 

DA: Typically in America it's 50%. You sell 75% and in America they sell 
50%. 

Stefan Aust: If we sell very well we get about 20% back. If we don't 
sell very well we get about 30% back.

DA: The way it works is that the newsstand does not have to pay for 
those copies that they did not sell. And in fact they get a credit from 
the publishing company for the magazines they return unsold and so it's 
very important to calculate the right number to put out, and then to 
have a good selling cover. Do you pay for position on the newsstand?

Stefan Aust: No. 

DA: Because the ones that are returned, they rip the cover off and send 
them back...

Stefan Aust: They don't do that. Because the circulation is very stable 
they have send back 20 to 30%, but if you compare it to Focus, sometimes 
they have 60% and sometimes 35. And so it costs them a lot of money to 
print it and to send it away and right now the circulation on the 
newsstand compared to the last year at Focus(is this the right title?) 
went down by about 17%. It's a rather new magazine for about five years 
so I think they are getting into tough times right now. And Shtal??? as 
I told you was very very big some ten or 15 years ago, and they dropped 
the circulation quite a lot. It's a little bit like or used to be like 
Life, looked like Life magazine. The main thing was that it is printed 
very well and they had big huge color photos about current events, war, 
you know revolutions and things. And you can imagine if you concentrate 
your magazine on picture stories about current affairs, it's been over 
and on TV before you get your print machine started. So it's not 
surprising that their circulation dropped so much. And they are really 
in trouble because they don't really know which way they can develop the 
magazine. So right now, our market share, if we compare it to Shtal and 
Focus, it goes up by almost one percent a year although we are only 
stable, we are not growing, but the others are going down. So my market 
share if you compare it to these magazines is something like 35% of the 
whole market if you put the magazines together. Focus is a little beyond 
that and Shtal still is a little higher. But this year we sold a few 
copies better than Shtal. And when I looked into their figures as far as 
we know them, I think they are all manipulating their circulation quite 
a lot. We cannot do it because we are rather small company. (rest of 
this statement inaudible)

Student question: inaudible-she doesn't get it, who else is in the 
market.....

Stefan Aust: Well they are different, but still the closest. There are 
no other magazines that you would compare with in that market. There are 
weekly newspapers that if you compare the content quite close to Der 
Speigel. They have a circulation of around half a million or something. 
I think they sell something like 200,000 on the newsstand. And then 
there is a new weekly newspaper called ?????, and they tried to have the 
same success towards ???? as Focus has towards Der Speigel. But that 
didn't really work. They say they have a circulation of 140,000 and 
actually they sell on the newsstand some 20,000 or something and they 
are having to push their subscribers quite a lot to get their 
circulation up which is a pity. It's quite well made. But the market is 
very small and actually it's not only because of how the television-all 
the newsmagazines and news shows you have on television, but it's daily 
newspapers as well that have changed during the past ten or 15 years. 
They are much more into investigative reporting and background 
information than some 10 or 15 years ago. So if you see a magazine like 
Der Speigel lets say as a front runner of investigative journalism, I 
hope and I think that we are still ahead, but daily newspapers like ???? 
they have been getting much better into investigative reporting. And 
they are coming out every day and that's not easy for us to compete with 
them. But on the other hand I think there is no magazine in Europe, 
maybe not in the world that has such a big staff that are very very 
good. We have more than 200 journalists full time. 

DA: What is the entry level editor's salary? and do you always hire 
people who have experience? Do you ever hire inexperienced people?

Stefan Aust: The young journalists we hire come from journalism 
schools. We don't educate young journalists. We don't have internships. 
But we pay 20 percent of the budget of the ??? publishing company which 
belongs to ??? owns 25% of Der Speigel by the way. And they have their 
own journalism school in Hamburg where they teach some 20 or 30 young 
journalists a year for two year's term. And there are always 2,000 or 
3,000 people who want to join that school, it's really amazing. And we 
took a lot of journalists from that school during the last year, which 
was not always good that we took all these journalists. We selected out 
of big numbers of young journalists who had finished their studies at 
university. And they were tested. They were tested mainly for knowledge 
and ability to write. And you have a lot of young people who regard 
themselves as an elite just because they were taken by that school. Then 
at two years, because they can write very well and they know a lot, they 
are the elite before they start working and therefore they never learned 
how to bang on a door and ring a bell and call somebody that doesn't 
want to be called. They lack the ?? abilities and research and for me, 
as far as I can see at Der Speigel, the most important thing is to get 
news into the magazine that you cannot find on the street. You actually 
have to go and do some research. What I did, I took actually a few 
people from television, I took the 3 or 4 of the best journalists I had 
at Der Speigel television. And they are very good. They know how to 
work. They work every weekend and they still work every weekend. We 
don't hire anybody who makes less than 100,000 DM which is about $70,000 
a year. At Speigel television I made it completely different. I took a 
lot of people who just wanted to work there for three months and they 
all would get a thousand marks a month just so that they could live on 
it then after three months, most of them went away but some were so good 
that we took them. The daughter of ??? she asked whether she could work 
there. And she started to work for three months and she was very good, 
she had very good English and very good French and was a very good 
researcher. And so she stayed there. So most of the people who worked 
for Speigel television just stayed and they started with a much lower 
level. So when we hire a young journalist there except from the three 
month term when they really start work they get something like 3,000 a 
month. On the other hand, I have some journalists there who are 30 and 
make something like a quarter of a million DM. A few and actually a lot 
of women. In television we have more than 50 percent women. And when we 
hired them when they were 24 or something and when they are 30 they get 
married and have children and then they go and then we look for a new 
one. We never get rid of the men. 

Student Question: inaudible something about salaries.

Stefan Aust: It's very simple, the salaries are so high because we pay 
so much taxes in Germany.  When you make about a 100,000 DM a year as a 
single person, you are up to a highest level of tax so you pay about 50% 
tax. Actually when you think about that level it's less than it seems. 

Student: inaudible.

Stefan Aust: 120. It's very good. It's very well paid. I think 125 
marks if you have the cash? but if you compare it to what you think you 
get, actually the highest level of tax in Germany is 53% but then we 
have what you call ?????? for the East. It's another 10% of the income 
tax. So you are easily at 60%. And if you think about unemployment 
insurance and social ?? insurance, then you're suddenly over 60%. 

Student: Do you have a maximum?

Stefan Aust: The maximum is 53 plus solidarity plus all the insurance. 

David Abrahamson: Solidarity is the tax on Germans to fund the 
development of Eastern Germany. The highest in the United States is 28% 
federal and when you add all the other taxes it's probably another 10%. 
In the U.S. 35 to 40% would be the highest tax rate, which one would not 
get to until you make a substantial amount of money. It doesn't approach 
the burden in Scandinavia.

Student: inaudible/is 80% the maximum including the insurance?

Stefan Aust: No, no, you don't get up to 80. When you are around 120 or 
150,000 a year, you don't get much more. It goes up to 53 and that's it 
plus solidarity.

DA: I think we have time for one more question. 

Student question: inaudible

Stefan Aust: It was such a big chance I had there some ten years ago to 
start a completely new program in a developing market so we started with 
an audience of about 150,000 the first night we had about ten years ago, 
exactly ten years ago, and the highest level was something like 6.5 
million. Now the audience goes down again because there are so many 
different channels and everybody copies what we did so it was an 
adventure you couldn't imagine to have your own program. Nobody tells 
you what to do we could do whatever we wanted because we had some kind 
of its own life? And I could hire everybody I wanted to hire. And from 
the very beginning, let's say from the second year on, we had quite a 
lot of money and so we could put quite a lot of money into it because 
the ratings were so high and the advertisements were so high we could 
spend something like 7,000 DM per minute, which is really a 
lot...(inaudible)....And then all these events going on in Germany, the 
fall of the wall actually, (inaudible something in German and then 
people walking through?)  All the time we have BBC, and everybody coming 
and wants to buy this material. We did a lot of stories about the secret 
service in East Germany and we had camera crews in Russia when they had 
the revolution there and we had camera crews all over and that was 
really, really very interesting. The whole crew was young people, 
friends, because I always hire them when I like them, not experience, 
nothing else just who I like as a person, do I want in the editing room 
at night Sunday night with them and argue about the quality of the story 
(inaudible) and so a lot of very nice people, every two months, they 
have a big party. And I'm still responsible for that and it's a rather 
big thing now. We have about 200 people working there. It still has a 
very good reputation... and makes a lot of ??? and still makes a lot of 
???. Once a month I still go there and work with them over the weekend 
and go on the air? with them once a month. It's really nice. It's a lot 
of fun.